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Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
Lydia Millet
What if Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, the primary physicists from the Manhattan Project, returned to contemporary America to survey their atomic legacy? - Publishers Weekly
Soft Skull Press
June 2005
Featuring: Robert Oppenheimer; Enrico Fermi; Leo Szilard
506 pages
ISBN: 1932360859
Hardcover
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Contemporary
Acclaimed author Lydia Millet's latest novel is a black-
comic tour de force depicting atomic bomb creators Robert
Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard. Despite being
dead, these scientists are spotted in Santa Fe by a shy
librarian named Ann. She becomes convinced they are real
and, to the dismay of her husband, devotes herself to them.
The trio quickly acquire a sugar daddy — a young pothead
millionaire from Tokyo — and a vast cult following of
hippies, Christians, New Agers, bikers, A-bomb survivors,
and curious anthropologists who join them on an RV
pilgrimage to Washington, D.C. Heroes to some, lunatics or
con artists to others, the scientists finally become
messianic religious figureheads to fanatics who believe
Oppenheimer is the Second Coming. This imaginative novel,
rich with incident, brilliantly marries their journey to a
history of atomic and thermonuclear weapons and to the
emotionally intimate tale of a middle-class couple trying
to stay hopeful about the future as they grow close to the
men who gave birth to the nuclear threat.
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